IT IS TIME

DUN DUN DUNNN

3. Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation)
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Final Fantasy VIII is the story of a mercenary group called SeeD. We meet Squall, a SeeD completing his training, and a few others who accompany him. Along the way he meets a woman and falls in love, comes to terms with his feelings, and also there's some evil sorceress because of course there's an evil sorceress.

Final Fantasy VIII is a bit different from most other games in the series. GFs, Guardian Forces, essentially the summons of this game, play a huge roll. Each character needs to equip one to be able to do more than attack. With it they can then customize the battle commands, such as adding the use of magic or items. Junctioning a GF will also allow the player to improve certain character stats by Junctioning magic spells that the player draws from the enemy during battle. The maximum amount one character can hold of each spell is 100. This means that with each spell the character casts, it will deplete that spell, and the player will need to draw more to go back to 100. If a spell is Juntioned and the player uses it, that stat will decrease. There are a total of 6 main playable characters and 5 temporary.


General impressions:
Technically speaking, VIII is the first FF game I played. I don't count it because I couldn't make it past the Fire Cavern and Ifrit scared me. I was quite young. I couldn't remember anything about it other than the scary demon thing. Something I do remember was that it was a struggle to even get to play it at all because I wanted to only play Disc 3 because it had the girl (Rinoa) on it and I wanted to be the girl. My small brain took a while to understand that she was on ALL of the discs, not just the one with her face on it. Again, I was quite young. I played it again a few years later, it was my second one. This time I had a better understanding of how the game worked and I absolutely loved it. The characters, the story, the world. I've replayed it so many times since and every time is just as exciting.

Story:
A lot of people think its weird but I actually really like it. And I like it more starting when things get weird. It's a fantasy. I would have been more bummed if it stayed “teen mercenaries get hired to do stuff”. I liked the Moombas, and I liked how fantastical it had all become. The sorceresses, (SPOILER)the traveling to the past (kind of), the weird places like Esthar. It just felt... well like a fantasy. I don't know how else to describe it. It had me hooked the whole way. It also had kind of a more serious tone to me than other games in the series, but that could be because of Squall and how he felt and how I interpreted it based on similar feelings. I don't really like the space part, the whole thing just gave me question marks over my head. But I did love most of it and it also has one of my favourite video game romances ever.


Gameplay:
The gameplay I'm kind of torn on. I don't like how you magic works because I'm weird about having 100 of everything, so I could essentially not use magic in this game unless I drew it and cast it from the enemy directly. But I did like being able to customize the characters however I wanted, and it has my favourite summon system of any Final Fantasy game. I liked how Boost actually gave you something to do during the long summon animations, and overall it had my favourite summon designs. Overall it certainly isn't the best gameplay in the series, but it wasn't bad either.


World:
This game has one of my favourite Final Fantasy worlds, and video game worlds in general. There are so many beautiful locations, from Fisherman's Horizon to Balamb to Esthar to Winhill. Almost every new location had me going “wow” and they easily stay in my mind when I think back on the game. My favourite has to be Balamb Garden. It's so pretty and some of the most exciting moments happen there. It has great music, it's bigger than a lot of towns, and it has a lot of things you need. Would live there.


Characters:
I really like the characters in this game. Well, except for Irvine, but I don't hate him either. I think the characters are solid, the group is overall well written together, and it has some really strong relationships, even between the protagonists and the antagonists. I just wish some of the heroes had interacted more between each other than they did.

Favourite character: Squall Tw3lskc.jpg
Honourable mentions: Selphie, Zell QpNF8nq.jpg4lJUUIH.jpg

Squall is a character I can actually relate to really well and I found him very well written. He comes across like an emo jerk at first, but when they show you his thoughts, you can see he's put up a wall (SPOILER)because he's lost people he cares about. He's not a jerk, he's just emotionally stunted. And watching him grow and change was great and I really enjoyed it. I really loved how they would show you what he was thinking because it made it more clear that he was having emotional problems which is something I can identify with, although I deal with it differently. I like Selphie and Zell because they bring a lot of fun to an otherwise very serious game. Selphie's diary was super cute too and so was Zell and his romance.

Overall it has great characters, a beautiful world, one of my favourite main characters and romances, and an interesting story. It is one of my most replayed games ever and there's a reason it made it so high up on this list.

Also, fun fact about sharky and mine's joined game list that we lost. This is my number 3 overall and it was tied for his favourite Final Fantasy and pretty high on his individual list, so it made it to number one on our joined list